04/11/2021

BLOOM DESIGNERS IN “NEXT GENERATION” EXHIBITION AT WOW

The Fashion and Textiles Museum of WOW – World Of Wine, in Gaia, will host the temporary exhibition, “Next Generation”, with the emerging talents of BLOOM, Portugal Fashion’s new designers platform. The exhibition, from November 12th until January 9th 2022, will bring together six finalists of the Bloom Powered by Sonae Fashion competition: Marcelo Almiscarado […]

The Fashion and Textiles Museum of WOW – World Of Wine, in Gaia, will host the temporary exhibition, “Next Generation”, with the emerging talents of BLOOM, Portugal Fashion’s new designers platform.

The exhibition, from November 12th until January 9th 2022, will bring together six finalists of the Bloom Powered by Sonae Fashion competition: Marcelo Almiscarado and Maria Carlos Baptista (winners of the competition), Huarte (winner of the Sonae Fashion Honorable Mention) and also Ahcor, Rita Ibs and Kensal (finalists who were invited to join the BLOOM platform after participating in the competition).

For Mónica Neto, director of Portugal Fashion, the exhibition “is an opportunity to disseminate the work of new national fashion talents, as well as all the work being developed by BLOOM platform in projecting new names in national fashion, some already with international projection, as is the case of Maria Carlos Baptista, in Paris, and Huarte, who recently participated in the PF Sessions in Madrid.

The discovery, support and promotion of new fashion talents is one of the major goals of Portugal Fashion, which in October 2010, in its 27th edition, created the BlOOM project. Since then, it has enabled the presentation of collections to about 100 young designers and brands and nearly 200 students from nine fashion schools.

There is no shortage of examples of young designers who, after participating in Bloom, have consolidated their careers and today present collecttions in the main calendar of Portugal Fashion. These are the cases of David Catalán, Estelita Mendonça, Hugo Costa, Inês Torcato and Susana Bettencourt and, more recently, the brand Unflower and the young designer Carolina Sobral.

The BLOOM Portugal Fashion platform moves away from the traditional runway concept, in order to provide new designers with shows in a more informal, urban and multi-artistic environment. In Portuguese, ‘bloom’ means bloom, blossom, shine; it also means freshness, prosperity, brilliance. The goal is to convey the message that it is something new, something fresh, something that is being born or growing, but also something more laboratorial and therefore more experimental, more risky, more innovative.

About the Bloom Powered by Sonae Fashion contest and the exhibition:

For the 1st time with the support of Sonae Fashion, the Bloom Competition is a competition open to young fashion designers, with a view to their professional training, their public promotion and their integration into the labor market. The eight finalists of the competition were given the opportunity to present their creations in Portugal Fashion, as happened in this 47th edition of the event, in October 2021. The two winners, Marcelo Almiscarado and Maria Carlos Baptista, each received 4,000 euros to develop collections for the following seasons. These collections will be presented in the 48th and 49th editions of Portugal Fashion, in March and October 2021, respectively.

The winners of the Bloom Competition are also doing a nine-month paid internship (worth approximately 6 thousand euros) at the brands in Sonae Fashion’s portfolio (Salsa, Zippy, MO and Losan). Sonae Fashion also awarded an honorable mention, with a cash prize of 1,000 euros, to the best coordinated design, presented by Huarte. In addition, Salsa also decided to develop with the designer a capsule collection, which has just arrived in stores.

In the NEXT GENERATION exhibition, six of the finalists of the Bloom Powered by Sonae Fashion competition are participating from Portugal Fashion: Marcelo Almiscarado and Maria Carlos Baptista (winners of the competition), Huarte (winner of the Sonae Fashion Honorable Mention) and also Ahcor, Rita Ibs and Kensal (finalists who were invited to join the Bloom platform, after participating in the competition).

 

PT